Ewa Niwczyk | Dreamstime.com
Cherries 2013
The Chinese market for cherries is evolving and BC growers are in a good position to take advantage of that change, says Graem Nelson, well-known BC fruit marketer and currently Senior Export Consultant for Consolidated Fruit Packers in Kelowna.
“I am not an expert at anything, but I have flogged some cherries in the last 40 years,” Nelson told the BC Cherry Association AGM to a chorus of chuckles. “I had an opportunity to go to Asia Fruit Logistica this fall and during the time there I talked to importers from China and Hong Kong, as well as Chinese people who are in the business from Thailand and Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore.
“What I heard people say over and over again when I asked them what they were looking for when they were importing cherries, was flavour,” says Nelson. “They are taking for granted now that they are going to receive a firm product, that has a green stem, is of the size specified, has as good a shelf life as you can expect and they are talking more and more about flavour.”
That’s a change Nelson notes, and it is being driven by the Chinese consumer. It is no longer a market of gifts that look nice for the party secretary, the boss, or to be presented at autumn festival. It is now a matter of food and taste.
“The Chinese are at least as discriminating about the taste of their food as the French and the Japanese and Canadians,” says Nelson. “They want to eat food that tastes good. Importers and retailers talked about imported fruit that tasted flat.”
“So then I wondered if Canadian cherries had an edge in that department?” Nelson explained. And they do, he says.
Nelson analyzed data of about 500 sales of 9.5 row 5kg Canadian and US cherries in the months of August and September in the Jiang Nan market in the port of Guangzhou. “I discovered that Canadian cherries have about an eight per cent edge when it comes to the price of the product,” he says. “An eight per cent higher return is good, so the question is what do we do with that?”
Our industry has the chops to hold on to that advantage, Nelson says.
The BC advantage over the much larger Washington and Oregon production comes from the strong support our industry enjoys, our more advanced horticulture practices and our flexibility as vertically integrated businesses.
He says the industry has “tremendous support, whether from local researchers at Summerland working on storage and shipping techniques, help from the provincial government or CFIA to access markets (he calls CFIA support phenomenal), and the volunteers from the BC Cherry Association. “They have all worked on an undertaking with these target counties to develop system based approaches that make it possible for us to ship in,” says Nelson.
“We are very small players in the world wide supply chain for cherries,” Nelson points out. But that can be to our advantage, he says.
Washington and Oregon producers have been quick to invest in new sorting and cooling technologies, and that has improved their product. “They are now able to sort cherries in a way that produces a consistent uniform product given the cherries that they have,” says Nelson. “The overall perception of the quality of their fruit is that it is going up,”
But it’s the cherries that they have, that could be a disadvantage. “In my opinion their horticulture is lagging behind,” says Nelson. While he acknowledges progressive growers with young orchards, new varieties, and good management techniques, he says there are also 30 to 40 year old orchards that are being farmed much as they were in the 1980’s. “There is a lot of mediocre fruit down there.”
Farm size adds to the problem. “Because of the scale of their enterprise, they don’t do a lot of detailed work that you are capable of doing in your orchards,” says Nelson. “There are limitations to what you can do when you are farming 2,000 or 4,000 acres of cherries.”
That makes US growers largely dependent on the weather for the size of their fruit, says Nelson. “Not like BC where our export-minded cherry growers can control the size of the fruit they are producing, up to a limit.”
“Last year gave us the limit,” he adds. “There were people growing 10 and 11 row cherries who hadn’t done that for years”.
Size has also led the US industry to become segmented. “Growers grow, packers pack and brokers sell fruit, and in the heat of the season often there isn’t very much communication among them,” says Nelson. “When things go sideways because of heat, or rain, or fruit size, you can get chaotic selling that could put hundreds or even a thousand containers of fruit into China, that doesn’t really belong there due to poor quality.”
“Selling inedible cherries is not a sustainable business,” Nelson warns.
“The BC industry has a great opportunity to differentiate our cherries,” says Nelson. “Our smaller grower-packers can all benefit each others business by shipping good fruit, he says. “Carve our niches and fill them with fruit that tastes good.
“Ultimately, it is the Chinese consumer who will make the decision as to whether or not a particular cherry is going to be welcome in their country, and I think those people are going to insist that the cherries are delicious. or they are going to stop buying them.”